ESG not about wokeness but a business imperative: Punit Renjen

The focus on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) is not about moral good, social good, or “wokeness” – it is a business imperative, said Punit Renjen, deputy chairperson-supervisory board, SAP SE.

Speaking at a B20 panel on Saturday, Renjen said businesses need to address the climate question as that is what their employees increasingly want; this is what underpinned Deloitte’s work on ESG while he was heading it. “If I want to hire the very best individuals and I want to retain them, I must have a critical response to that question,” he said.

Speaking at the same event, Bernard Looney, CEO of BP, said ESG serves both moral and business good. “There is no choice to be made,” he said, but complexity of standards makes it hard to implement and may have negative unintended consequences.


While the International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB) standards may be complex, they should be accepted, Renjen said. However, a building block approach is needed to build on top of the ISSB's framework, rather than an “alphabet soup” of standards, he added.

At the same time, the idea that ESG is “woke” needs to be tackled by businesses by example he said. “We're trying to come up with a narrative to counter this false, uninformed narrative that some in the United States are trying to push that this is no business for business to be in, that business should just focus on the bottom line,” he added.

According to ITC chairman and MD Sanjiv Puri, simplicity and clear definitions are key. Further, regulators should have the capacity to dynamically review and update standards. “It needs to be a framework that’s adaptable,” he said. “The quality of reporting from a small and medium enterprise and a large enterprise…it cannot be expected to be the same,” he said.

Amid the “tectonic shifts” across industries in the climate transition, policy innovation by an “enlightened” government is needed, said Arunava Majumdar, dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Government can facilitate private innovation with public good, as it did with the India Stack, he said.